| abstract |
The religious values, moral visions, and environmental practices of black women affected by everyday environmental violence can be a resource for our climate crisis and can reshape our ethical relationship to the earth. This trajectory, however, has been understudied. Sociologists of religion report the disproportionality by which black people are affected by environmental violence, but very few explore their practices as an ethical resource. Similarly, while the field of Christian social eco-ethics and theology seek to construct inclusive moral visions of the earth, their frameworks often exclude the ethical constructions generated by poor black communities most immediately affected by our climate crisis.
My dissertation aims to close this gap by exploring the moral visions of the earth by urban black women living under environmental duress. I research how the knowledge and practices of black women activists living in Chicago's Altgeld Gardens housing project (known as the "toxic doughnut") can shift our moral relationship to the earth. I use ethnographic research and theoretical frameworks in Christian ecological ethics and black studies. Several questions drive my study: What are the spatial practices and ethical commitments of black women under environmental constraint? Given their everyday experience of our environmental crisis, what are their visions for the earth? What faith intuitions, morals, and politics guide their activism? My argument is that in understanding resistance to antiblack environmental violence as a generative force—an event that motivated black women's activism rather than just another instance of black suffering or inequality—a different moral imaginary arises; one in which the object of environmental violence becomes a subjective and ethical resource amid our climate crisis.
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